July 06, 2006

What's in Your Genes?

Perhaps you thought DNA was responsible only for your allergies, your dimples, and your male-pattern baldness. Wrong! In our brave new genomic world, companies have DNA, brands have DNA, and for all I know this blog has DNA that's itching to replicate.

What is corporate DNA? Not elementary, Drs. Watson and Crick. Here's a somewhat cynical definition from Buzzwhack's buzzword-compliant dictionary:

corporate DNA: A company's core values, culture, personality, etc., that supposedly gets passed along to all new employees. Corporate DNA, however, is actually altered slightly every time a new person is hired. And a wholesale shift can occur by simply replacing the CEO.

Values? Culture? Personality? Passed along through DNA? In the fact-based world, they call that "genetic determinism," and it's a fallacy. There's heredity, and there's environment.

But in the business-based world, "corporate DNA" can work miracles never seen in the laboratory. Indeed, "corporate DNA" has become shorthand for...well, anything we want to impute to a company's workforce, products, and way of doing business. The meaning is as subject to mutation as DNA itself. For example:

Corporate DNA can't be altered. "Like individuals, every company has its own DNA," writes Ed Sim in BeyondVC (2003). "Every company possesses a unique team with a unique culture, rhythm, and way of doing business. What many of us forgot during the last few years is that it is awfully hard to change one's DNA." On the other hand...

You can build stuff into corporate DNA.Cattle Logos in Philadelphia, for instance, promises to "build your brand into your corporate DNA."

You can infuse stuff into corporate DNA (Steve Jurvetson, inscrutably, on Google: "Can a mantra to not do evil infuse into the corporate DNA and continue to drive culture as a company scales?").

You can bake stuff into corporate DNA. Innovation, for instance. Also agility. [Updated links.]

You can map your corporate DNA, thanks to new software. "'A lot of organizations talk about their core competencies,' says Jon Walker, global leader for HR at Dow Chemical Co., 'but unless they measure them, it can be difficult to know what they really are.'" So true.

In business for yourself? You can have DNA too! Just go to PersonalDNA.com ("Your True Self Revealed"). No nasty cotton swabs required!(Thanks to A VC for this tip.)

Corporate DNA is metaphysical. "At Telenor Pakistan, our lives are made up of our Corporate DNA i.e. our Vision and Values. We believe that competencies influences [sic] a person what he or she is." Which explains why...

Religious institutions have DNA, too. "Every church, ministry or organization has it's [sic] own unique DNA just like every organism and living thing does," St. Paul's Collegiate Church in Storrs, Connecticut, gently consoles. "Our DNA at St. Paul's is made up of many strands, that when brought together, form our 'core identity', kind of a genetic-who-are-we kind of thing."

Kind of a genetic-who-are-we kind of thing. Like, amen!

[Update: The DNA post no longer appears on the St. Paul's blog. But other religious institutions talk about their DNA, too: Harvest Church, for example, and Christianity Today.]

We can find the origins of "corporate DNA" in the work of Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915), who invented "scientific management" (original meaning, greatly simplified: "weeding out lazy workers and getting efficient workers to produce more"). In the century since Taylor analyzed assembly lines, the idea of management as a scientific endeavor--originally considered laughable--has taken on the status of orthodoxy. You see this reverence for science, or pseudoscience, everywhere in the language of business: we employ "delta models" and "force field analysis," we "leverage" in ways Archimedes never would have imagined, and we use lots and lots of numeric formulas--from Six Sigma to Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to The 48 Laws of Power.

"Like me, the people who have good enough posture and golf swings to become CEOs see great value in a linguistic tool that makes them seem smarter than the average employee. The thing I like most about their use of the term 'corporate DNA' is that it suggests that changing the direction of a company is on par with gene splicing in terms of its intellectual demands. By using the term, managers are raising the expectations of their abilities."

I've traced "corporate DNA" back to 1998, when Ken Baskin published Corporate DNA: Learning from Life. (If you know of an earlier citation, I'd love to see it.) Baskin's great leap forward, critics said, was to look at companies as if they were living organisms instead of using mechanical metaphors; he talks about "market ecologies," "the corporate nervous system," and "adapt or die" being "the law of the marketplace."

I'm all for metaphors; they give us concrete pictures for abstract concepts. But "corporate DNA" is inaccurate, lazy, and just plain silly. Let's excise it from the lexicon.